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Fedora Discussion: "ARM Is A Dead End"

06-15-2012, 02:40 PM

Phoronix: Fedora Discussion: "ARM Is A Dead End"

From time-to-time unique/crazy/odd discussions get born on the Fedora development mailing list -- such as talking nasty about Ubuntu's Unity, trying to make Fedora a rolling-release distribution, etc. The latest discussion that's been very active has been about whether ARM hardware is a dead-end...

LOL what has the julia language got to do with the "ARM Is A Dead End" thread, you posted the wrong thread link http://lists.fedoraproject.org/piper...ne/168631.html
it should have been http://lists.fedoraproject.org/piper...ne/168637.html
as for Kevin Kofler the initiator of that thread he seems to be rather lacking in the facts of the ARM Cortex and its long term future backed by all the worlds largest vendors of low power devices anywhere and then im not impressed by his other "as we have done since we finally got rid of the legacy PPC burden. Niche architectures are exactly what secondary architectures are for." comment ether.

PPC/AltiVec SIMD in still rather popular in the worlds mass Embedded market place today infact several vendors produce and provide PPC SOC refreshes on a regular basis complimenting the ARM cores and their many devices keeping the internet running, still it takes all sorts even narrow minded short sighted unimaginative fedora developers to keep the software landscape interesting i guess, if he had it his way the average fedora dev/user would never run a basic fedora on any Embedded devices like wireless routers,NAS etc

Comment

As I understand it Fedora is supposed to be like a test bed for the latest technology and a test bed for Red Hat.

Since Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) runs on enterprise servers, and Fedora is supposed to be a test bed for it, I think Fedora should support POWER and SPARC. Lately ARM is doing some inroads on the server market too, and is expected to make more inroads when the 64-bit variants arrive. So I think they should be experimenting with ARM too in anticipation.
At least Canonical believes in ARM and is betting big on it.

Comment

As I understand it Fedora is supposed to be like a test bed for the latest technology and a test bed for Red Hat.

Since Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) runs on enterprise servers, and Fedora is supposed to be a test bed for it, I think Fedora should support POWER and SPARC. Lately ARM is doing some inroads on the server market too, and is expected to make more inroads when the 64-bit variants arrive. So I think they should be experimenting with ARM too in anticipation.
At least Canonical believes in ARM and is betting big on it.

first of all its officially ARM's stated intent to get into the server markets for quite some time now, then OC you can already access 40-bit addressing with the Cortex A15 and then theres this OC "Speaking at ARM TechCon 2011 in Santa Clara, Calif., ARM Chief Technology Officer Mike Muller said the new v8 architecture would consist of two main execution states: AArch64 and AArch32, with the former introducing a new A64 for 64-bit processing instruction set, while the latter would continue to support ARM’s existing instruction set.

“ARM V8 fully supports 32 bit ARMv7a software,” said Muller, adding that the architecture had been designed to “maximize the benefits across both 32-bit and 64-bit application areas.""

"THE RED HAT sponsored Fedora Linux distribution believes a 64-bit ARM architecture will prove to be the tipping point for ARM servers.

The Fedora Project, which is heavily sponsored by enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat, has seemingly been lagging behind Canonical's Ubuntu Linux distribution following a round of server announcements from Dell and HP professing certification for Ubuntu.

However Jon Masters, principal software engineer at Red Hat and leader of Fedora's ARM effort told The INQUIRER that 64-bit ARM chips will prove to be the killer feature for ARM-based servers...."

Comment

The guy who opened that discussion must really be quite narrow minded. If anything ARM is on the rise.

I fully agree. x86 may still be the king in terms of raw horsepower at the moment, but ARM still beats x86 by leaps and bounds when it comes to power consumption. In the mobile space, which is the area of real growth, power consumption, not raw horsepower, is king.

Comment

The exact same thing (OP) could be said about x86, and that same statement could have been said 20 years ago.

X86 is here due to the industry on both user and manufacturer side have an interest to keep it going, it's not magically superior and it definitely has flaws, especially in the legacy crud it carries.

Personally I'd like to see some nice MIPS 1074K or Aptiv cpu's with some decent output interfaces, that don't cost 600++$ (aka, typical development board cost).

The statement in general is rather ridiculous anyway until there is some decent user generated statistics on the x86 phones, lots of ways a manufacturer might try to adjust performance/power statistics to their own interest by for example disabling services that might normally run on the units.

Comment

ARM, particularly quad core Cortex A9 and A15s are going to be VERY competitive for the low end netbook and nettop market. Once the 64 bit ARMv8 SoCs are released it will be an all new ball game as well. Let's not forget nVidia's Project Denver which, according to nVidia, is supposedly going to redefine the desktop as well as the data center.